Here in San Francisco, we’ve had a bit of tradition around changing how folks see the world with images. In the 1870s, a San Francisco photographer named Eadweard Muybridge captured some of the earliest motion pictures. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television image in his laboratory on 202 Green Street.

And way back in 2002, a small team in San Francisco introduced video in Flash Player, bringing seamless video to 9 in 10 connected computers – allowing video to become an integral part of the web. Three years ago, that team introduced H.264 video to over 93 percent of users, bringing immersive high quality video to more people than ever. Flash Player has helped create a beautiful web that moves and connects. Flash Player 10.2 continues that tradition by introducing Stage Video: smoother, more efficient, more beautiful HD video for the web.

Bringing Beautiful Video to the Stage

Stage Video lets websites take advantage of full hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline. This builds on the H.264 hardware accelerated decoding in Flash Player 10.1. Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player can play even higher quality video while using dramatically less processing power, giving users a better experience, greater performance, and longer battery life. In our testing across supported systems, we’ve found it’s up to 34 times more efficient.

Put another way, Flash Player using Stage Video can effortlessly play beautiful 1080p HD video with just 1-15% CPU usage on a common Mac or Windows computer* – working across platforms and browsers, it will enable the best video experience for the most people. Many millions of additional PCs, from netbooks to desktops, can now become slick HD home theaters on the web.

Note that Stage Video performance gains might not be visible right away. Websites and content providers will first need to update their video players before users experience Stage Video playback with Flash Player 10.2 on their sites. For developers, this typically means updating a SWF player file. However, no changes are needed to existing video libraries or infrastructure, and websites just continue to leverage Flash Player benefits including unmatched reach, advanced streaming capabilities, DVR-like playback control, rich interactivity, content protection, and consistency. Since adoption of new Flash Player releases is accelerating, websites can expect that many of the over 1 billion people with Flash Player will be ready to benefit from Stage Video in Flash Player 10.2 soon.

Companies like Vimeo, Brightcove, Epix, and YouTube have already started work to enable support for Stage Video to deliver amazing video playback experiences. You’ll be seeing them enable Stage Video performance in the near future. And you can try examples of Stage Video today after upgrading to Flash Player 10.2. Tens of thousands of sites will be enabled by the Brightcove player, and Jeff Whatcott at Brightcove explains, “Brightcove is continually innovating to deliver great video experiences. We have been blown away by the performance and efficiency of Stage Video and we are truly excited to be working so closely with Adobe to bring this breakthrough technology to customers.” And Ryan Hefner at Vimeo notes, “Since Vimeo’s users upload a lot of high-definition content, being that HD is the default quality for videos viewed on our site, the decision to take advantage of Stage Video in Flash Player 10.2 was a no brainer. We love to keep up on the latest technologies, and if those technologies also enhance the user experience for our users then it’s a win-win.” Folks that want to deliver gorgeous, smooth HD video to more people than ever have reason to be excited, and more and more sites will enable Stage Video in the coming months.

Additional New Capabilities in Flash Player 10.2

Along with the new Stage Video architecture, we’re adding features in Flash Player 10.2 to enable even more polished experiences.

Video at its best is immersive, so Flash Player allows you jump to true full screen playback with one click. With multiple display full screen support in Flash Player 10.2, you can now easily watch your favorite videos in true full screen on one display while you multitask on another and get some workdone (or not).

Added support for custom native mouse cursors lets designers and developers create their own static or animated cursors with silky smooth responsiveness, enabling richer game and application interfaces.

Support is included for the GPU rendering technology in Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser.

Today and the Future

You can install Flash Player 10.2 today. We encourage everyone, developers and users, to try it out and let us know what you think. And hang tight for exciting mobile updates. We’ll be providing more information about the next Flash Platform runtimes – Flash Player and AIR – on phone and tablet devices at Mobile World Congress next week. We’re thrilled about today’s launch, and we hope you enjoy it.

* For example, using Flash Player 10.2 with Stage Video hardware acceleration, we’ve tested a Mac Mini released two years ago and a low-powered GPU-enabled Windows netbook playing smooth full HD 1080p video using less than 8% of the CPU; more powerful computers use even less.

262 Responses to Flash Player 10.2 is Here: Available Now for Windows, Mac, and Linux

On pc, Seems to break Youtube, green line through the middle of the videos, with the video being played above, and below the green line, in a sort of stretch split screen’o’vision.
Right clicking on the video, selecting settings, and disabling hardware acceleration fixes it.

Watching a 1080p YouTube video on a barely 4 month old 17 inch MacBook Pro using the latest version of Google Chrome, which has Flash 10.2, and I’m still hitting 30% CPU usage. Am I doing something wrong?

Sites with Stage Video -enabled players will be able to fall back to the classic video pipeline while still taking advantage of the H.264 hardware accelerated decoding introduced in Flash Player 10.1. From an end-user perspective, video just plays.

Stage video is nice, cpu usage of flash is way down, but the kernel_task is still eating loads of cpu, at least on the latest MBP 13″ and MBAs.
kernel_task using 15-25% cpu while playing back youtube stagevideo, even after having waited for the whole file to load, which means its not due to the airport driver while downloading.

Flash Player 10.2 runs on 64-bit operating systems, but folks using 64-bit browsers, including 64-bit IE9, should continue to use Flash Player “Square” (which also includes the enhanced IE9 GPU support in Flash Player 10.2).

Why can’t I download it? The page keeps re-directing me to the Dutch page, telling me there is only 10.1 and 10.2 is in the lab. How do I get to the US site or somewhere else where I CAN download the 64 bit version?

Its brilliant to have new features. I am really impressed with all of the great new features in recent Flash Players (and Molehill due in FP 11). But what about the bugs? Did any of them get fixed in this update? That’s what Flash developers really want. So that we can be truly proud of the Flash Platform again.

And to follow up, your installer seems broken on my Mac (on 10.6.7). It just gets to 95% and then just sits there (I’ve left it for more than an hour). Force quitting and then rerunning the installer then results in an immediate ‘installation failed’ message with no actual information on what fails or how to possibly fix it. I had to manually uninstall Flash, then restart my computer before your installer would complete.

I will be so happy once Flash content completely disappears from the internet.

This worked fine on 2007 MacBook Pro, but caused my 2007 Mac Mini’s display to go bonkers while playing FarmVille in full screen mode. Then the machine froze and I had to do the PMU reset procedure to bring the machine back.

Because there is no common, agreed-upon H.264 hardware decoding API for Linux, it’s difficult to support H.264 acceleration across fragmented Linux graphics hardware and drivers.

However, the team has added some experimental support for H.264 hardware accelerated decoding on Linux in this release (tested on NVidia GT 330 and Broadcom BCM70015 hardware). See the release notes for more details.

In addition, with Flash Player 10.2 many Linux users can benefit from other parts of the Stage Video pipeline, specifically, hardware accelerated rendering, on sites with Stage Video -enabled players.

In my case, on a Mac Pro 2009 model, I experience rhythmical stops in video display. Every second or so the picture hangs shortly, while audio plays uninterrupted, no matter if fullscreen or small display is chosen. None of the previous betas did this on may Mac. Think I’ll revert to Square beta.

Flash 10.2 doesn’t lets you watch full screen video in Optimus laptops. This is something that has been broken since when Flash 10.2 was in beta version and lots of people reported it yet Adobe did nothing to fix it.

Running Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat 64 bits, I’ve updated the flash player from APT and can’t no longer read flash files. YouTube videos are not available for example, Firefox keeps asking if I want to install the Flash plugin (despite already being installed).

“H.264 Hardware decoding on Linux is available as an experimental feature and has
been tested on NVidia GT 330 and Broadcom BCM70015 GPUs. Users may choose to
enable hardware decoding by adding EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1 in an mms.cfg
configuration file. Users may experiance instability and crashes while watching
hardware accelerated video. Please report any issues tohttp://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer.”

Where do I find this mms.cfg file? How do I know it is working? Will I experience lesser quality video with the gf card doing the decoding?

I still get the annoying dual screen full screen problem in linux, the fullscreen is cancel as soon as I click on some other window, is there an option somewhere or this feature is not in the linux version yet?

Did you do something to improve the multithreading of the 10.2 release ?

Flash 10.2 is using more of both cores on my mac. I am working on some audio visualisation for a show (so tying to push things a little), I have never seen flash using much more than 1 core (and a tidbit). Not sure what you did but it’s working.

-Firstly, thanks for your great work. Here I’ve some questions I hope could be answered by the team:

1. Is there any benefit for users that has GPU without H.264 hardware acceleration built-in? Like pre-UVD2 GPUs (AMD/ATi) or pre-GeForce 8 GPUs (nVidia)?

2. I currently use Radeon X1250 IGP on Windows XP, is there any possibility for Adobe to leverage the AVIVO feature to help parts of the H.264 decoding?

3. When was the last time the CPU-only (software decoder) portion of the H.264 decoder in Flash Player get updated for performance/efficiency (rather than security bugfixes)? Is the decoder developed by Adobe in-house or licensed from 3rd-party? Or would you license the H.264 decoder from CoreAVC, maybe?

4. In my own test, a same H.264 video file (from YouTube) played using MPlayer uses between half to two-thirds of CPU power (less CPU usage) when compared to being played in YouTube player with Flash Player 10.2. And that’s with post-processing filter turned-on! How much YUV-to-RGB overhead cost CPU time? Is the overhead proportionally increase with the overlay objects on the video being played (e.g. progress/seek bar)?

5. IMHO, the numbers of users with HW-acceleration enabled GPU is still pretty small compared to users without it (they are using non-HW accelerated GPU, like me). Is there any plan for Adobe to regularly improve/update the CPU-only H.264 decoder (may includes other formats too, such as FLV1/Sorenson, and also audio decoders) so that it will be better/efficient (in terms of CPU usage) as time progresses (like other standalone decoders out there)? Or is it already being done/in progress?

-On another note, I’d like to request something like “CPU usage/priority control” option in Flash Player Global Settings so users with single-core CPU wouldn’t be choked with 100% CPU usage when they play Farmville or similar games (or complex Flash apps for that matter). Is this possible?

Hi, the new player blocks my computer!!!! this has been downloaded automatically in Chrome, and when one video begin to star (youtube, vimeo, etc), my computer bolcks and shut down the monitor signal. :-(((
I only have the option to reset it.
I will have to donwgrade now. 🙁

I have problems with YouTube. I can’t see no video, just a black box.
Has this something to do with my MacBook late ’07?
I use the latest update of Snow Leopard.
It works only if I let run Safari in 32bit mode.
Any help?

The new dual monitor full-screen support does not seem to be working in linux (Ubuntu 10.10). Maximized video still goes to the wrong screen and is still minimized when clicking in another window. Are there any fixes that can be done or settings that need to be changed to get this working?

Thanks, flash is now unusable with linux. Settings dialog can no longer be used with a mouse and e.g youtube videos show up on every workspace. the best part is a reboot is needed to get rid of the floating flash windows!

No OS X PowerPC support in Flash 10.2 and because of security flaws in Flash 10.1 we are required to delete Flash from all our older machines. It’s not a Universal Binary unless it includes support for both Intel and PowerPC cpus.

Hello Adobe team, you make nice products but you don’t think that people don’t just UPGRADE their laptops for the sake of adobe flash player…I work fine on my Intel 1700 Pentium laptop and I just need flash player 9 for the you tube to work…i don’t want to buy another laptop with dual core just for your adobe flash player 10.2. YOU DON’T FORCE PEOPLE TO UPGRADE THEIR COMPUTER JUST TO WATCH YOU TUBE VIDEOS. THIS IS NOT FREEDOM. JUST RELEASE A AVERSION FOR XP WITH ONE CORE!! I’M ON YOU TUBE AND I CAN’T SEE ALL THE VIDEOS. I stay with with flash player 9 and this is just my opinion. iNVENT SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY.INTERNET IS FOR EVERYBODY.

I’m having trouble with seeing the video in downloads from You-tube. I did a adobe un-install and reinstall but still no go. a few videos work but most don’t meaning I get the audio but not the video. I’ve had trouble in the past with adobe installing than a day or so later saying it wasn’t. The latest version installs in seconds with no apparent problems. I’m running XP Home on a older computer. 1 gb ram. This just came up, it has been working fine in the past.

This is a disaster — I uninstalled the old Flash Player to install this because 10.2 wouldn’t install. Now nothing installs, and no videos will play on my Mac. I’m using OS 10.6 & the most recent version of Firefox (which insisted I upgrade Flash Player). Why did you replace something that worked with something that doesn’t. I’ve tried reinstalling an older version, but that won’t install either.

The lastest version of Flash sucks. It completely wrecked my computer’s ability play any facebook games and Evony. The previous version worked fine on a 5 year old laptop and a 2 yr old laptop. I’ve reverted to an old version of flash which seems to have corrected the problem. I can’t use Google Chrome anymore because it auto updates to the newest version of Flash which will not allow any flash rich sites to open correctly. What the heck did you do to Adobe?

I must admit HTML5 is the future. However, I welcome this new Flash 10.2 for all the sites that do need it like Hulu and other online video sites.There is a new “virtual media center” site that will be great to use on tablets. It aggregates movies and shows from many different sites, some that use Flash, so Flash 10.2 will help, take a look …

The auto installer doesn’t run automatically because it tries to access the internet on startup before the wireless connection is up. This is on win xp for me. The software needs to add a “try again” button to allow the user to restart the download when internet is actually there.

The final verision has serius problems wiht final Internet Explorer 9 which just about week ago hit world wide.

Problem specially with youtube full screen mode, when hitting video into full screen mode i will see first time only black screen no picture but music is, after exciting full sreen it works fine again, and when i again switch to full screen it works fine then.

Good morning Mr Tom Nguyen, I tried downloading flash player 10.2 and all was going well, in fact it downloaded 100%, however…when it was time I think to install, I got a message telling me “installation or download will continue when internet explorer is closed”. I’m still not real saavy on the pc yet, but love learning. And I would especially love to learn what’s going on here. My operating system is w/vista, with the great desire to ‘upgrade’ to w7 ((: l Thanks so much in advance for your help.

Hi. Thanks for all these nice efficiency improvements in Flash Player 10.1 and 10.2!

I have 2 questions.

1. How does Flash Player determine whether or not to use HW-acceleration with GPU’s that use both a “fixed” and (in addition) a “dynamically variable” amount of graphics RAM, such as the Intel Mobile series 4 chipset graphics (4500M HD)?

For example, on such an Intel based laptop configured with 64 MB of “fixed” graphics RAM and (in addition) allowing usage of up to 1.0GB of “dynamic” graphics RAM, would Flash Player 10.2 use hardware acceleration or not?

The 10.2 Desktop system requirements appears to be vague for this situation. It seems to imply that you need 128 MB of “fixed” graphics RAM for the player to enable HW acceleration. Is this interpretation of the System Requirements correct?

2. Is there a place one can easily check to see what HW accelartion decision(s) Flash Player has made for a given task on a given platform? If not, could this be added as an “Info” tab along with the other Settings tabs?

I should have specified in my previous comment/question that I’m running a 64 bit operating system on a 32 bit browser; IE. With 4096 memory, 500 gb hd. I prefer not to use the ‘square’ if i really don’t have to.

I keep getting a popup window saying Flash 10.2 is available. When I start the process of updating I have to assure that I have read the license agreement. Fair enough. But when I try to read it, it won’t open. Has anyone actually seen it? Is it my computer, or is there something wrong on the other end?

It looks like the Flash Player has started to automatically downgrade the quality from HIGH to LOW under certain circumstances (and never upgrade again). Is this my imagination? It provides a very poor viewing experience for some our our pages. We have coded a _quality = “HIGH” in an onEnterFrame to get around it for now – which is embarrassing.

The new multiple monitor full-screen support works really great. I’m using windows 7 64 bit. Thanks for the update. 🙂 Before this version some flash video streams stayed only full screen until you did somethin on the other monitor, which was really annoying.

this adobe flash is real NONSENSE………….!!
How can a product develope with checking it’s own compatibility w.r.t differerenet Browsers that r most popular in the world & release in the internet to use for the users.
Even developers should take this a pint as all the Browsers are becoming non resposive with the automatic update of flash & thus making the laptop of all the users on Win 7 with Firefox/Chrome/Maxthon/Avant browsers…………

This is ralyy a serious threat for Adobe Flask….if this is not rectified the company is going to shutdown as if not u someother company will find a solution soon , thus adobe will fail in the market if they do not solve the above problem.